GOV.UK Design System
GOV.UK デザインシステム / 2012– / Style / Platform Screen Languages
The design language the UK government's Government Digital Service publishes and maintains for public services. Everything runs in one undecorated left aligned column set in GDS Transport, and the green button keeps square corners while carrying a darker green band along its bottom edge, dropping by exactly that depth when pressed. Whatever holds keyboard focus turns yellow with a black rule under it.
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At a glance
Visual cues
- One undecorated left aligned column, with almost no boxes and no shadows
- A green button with square corners and a darker green band along its bottom edge, which drops by that exact depth when pressed
- Whatever holds keyboard focus turns yellow with a black rule drawn beneath it
- Type sizes step coarsely through 48, 36, 24, 19 and 16px with nothing in between
Best used for
- Rebuilding a government or public service form as a single left aligned column asking one question per screen
- Making the current focus position unmistakable for someone operating the service by keyboard alone
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Dictionary entry
- Type
- One sans serif only, in five fixed sizes with nothing in between. Headings are bold and body text sits at 19px.
- Composition
- Hold the content to a single narrow column and align every element to one left rule. No multi column layouts and no boxes, because a horizontal rule is the only break between topics.
- Material
- Colour is tied to meaning and never used decoratively. Buttons keep a corner radius of zero and gain their thickness from a band of their own darker shade along the bottom edge. The focus state is always yellow ground with a black underline.
- Caution
- Tidying the look by rounding button corners or thinning the borders on form inputs deletes the two signals this style relies on entirely, the pressable thickness and the position of focus.
- Further study
- the colour usage rules in the Styles section of the GOV.UK Design System / how the focused helper in govuk-frontend produces the yellow ground and the black underline / the origin of the typeface GDS Transport, and why it is distributed for government services alone
Related entries
- Neo-grotesque Sans (ネオ・グロテスク)Shared effects: Trust / Calm.Compare GOV.UK Design System and Neo-grotesque Sans
- Swiss (スイス・スタイル)Shared effects: Trust / Calm.Compare GOV.UK Design System and Swiss
More from Platform Screen Languages
Continue through styles in the same Platform Screen Languages family, prioritised by shared effects.
- Adwaita (アドワイタ)Shared effects: Technique / Calm / Trust.
- Breeze (ブリーズ)Shared effects: Technique / Calm / Trust.
- GitHub Primer (GitHub Primer)Shared effects: Technique / Trust / Calm.
Browse all Platform Screen Languages entries
Cite this entry
The dictionary is meant to be linked to. Take whichever form fits where you are writing.
- Link
- https://indexstyle.org/styles/govuk-design-system
- Markdown
- [GOV.UK Design System — IndexStyle](https://indexstyle.org/styles/govuk-design-system)
- HTML
- <a href="https://indexstyle.org/styles/govuk-design-system">GOV.UK Design System — IndexStyle</a>